Gordon Mangione just announced that last night they posted a new SQL Best Practices Analyzer available on the website. I didn't see it when I just did a quick scan, but look for it.

This is a “read-only” tool, so it won't change your server settings. Has about 70 rules currently, plus you can define your own additional rules to scan and report. This will run against SQL2000. Go check it out!

Just got home a little while ago from the Welcome Reception and post-func activities. The Welcome Reception was okay. It had some free food. I made little roast beef sandwiches with the rolls they had there. Probably could have made a serious meal out of it if I'd wanted to. I saw some cookies and some melted brie, but didn't go there. Found Graz and "the team" (Tim, Doug, David, Lance, Denise and Scott) pretty quickly. The eight of us did a lot of socializing together last year and we pretty quickly picked up where left off. I met a few new folks and handed out my new business cards (with reference to this blog now listed on them) to everyone I talked to. Gotta keep networking when you're a contractor...

Before the reception was officially over, we decided to head over to the Cheesecake Factory across the street from the convention center. Unfortunately it was going to be nearly an hour before we got in, so we went around the corner to a new sports bar and grill. And like all good techies, swapped horror stories over food and drinks. Unfortunately Graz took off to go back and stress over, um, I mean review, his presentation which is tomorrow. He'll be a lot more fun once that is over.

We ended up the evening trading war stories about bad contractors (which even as a contractor I've had to deal with bad ones) and discussing the good and bad points about the MCDBA certification. The whole topic of certification can be a lengthy debate by itself, but the four of us who remained to talk about it were pretty much of the same mind (and I'll let you figure out what our opinion was, given that none of us are currently certified).

So it was a good start, but for me the real meat comes tomorrow. Kicking things off with Gordon Mangione, Corporate Vice President for SQL Server at Microsoft (I wonder if he's related to Chuck??). Wonder if he'll have anything new to share with us since a lot was spilled at the PDC just two weeks ago. I wasn't there, but anyone who has been reading the SQLTeam Weblogs has gotten a good dose of the news already. Looking forward to sharing more good stuff from tomorrow's sessions.

I previously blogged about my fears that making the .NET languages available in Yukon might lead to horrible stored procedures by people who don't understand the difference between set-based and iterative processing. I am still worried about that, but I just read a blog entry by Greg Linwood that talks more about using the .NET languages in lieu of extended stored procedures and COM. Okay, I can accept that and see value in it. We get a lot of questions on SQLTeam about sending email from SQL Server without using SQLMail (usually because they don't have an Exchange Server. There are a few articles on SQLTeam about how to do that in SQL 7 or 2000. But I could imagine it might be easier / better to do this with a .NET assembly instead of, for example, the sp_OA calls. On the other hand, I read somewhere that SQLMail was changed in Yukon to allow sending SMTP mail without an Exchange Server, so maybe this whole example I cooked up is already obsolete.

Ah well... time will tell. Can't say I personally have had any real need to do COM or XPs yet anyway, so it might all just be a moot point for me.